[freeside] Billing by time,Megs,Other services:isdn,SSL

[mark at pc-intouch.com]

On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, Isaac Loven wrote:

> Hi all
> We want to impliment freeside with billing by time and per Meg
> downloaded.
> 
> Has anyone already developed / modified some of the s/w for freeside to
> do this ?????????????

That's quite a bit harder than you might expect.

Tracking time isn't that hard, because it's all in your RADIUS accounting
file.  If RADIUS logs to an SQL database, it's even easier.

Tracking throughput is harder, especially if you're not at some point
sending all your traffic through a Unix box.  You have to run a packet
sniffer (or IP accounting in your router) and correlate the throughput
data from that (which is likely to be measured by the packet) with the
RADIUS accounting record showing who was using that IP address at that
time.  Ouch.

> I have searched the mail archive and have found comments like:
>   "setting up a meetered billing system would require...perl ... , an
> understanding of  ...  Radius ... SQL"

If you have an SQL RADIUS server, it's not that hard.  There are several
of these out there.  See http://www.softagency.co.jp/mysql/ .

>    - combined with  FS::cust_pkg  $record->suspend   to control
> activation.

Yes, you'll need to plug your metering system into the Freeside API.

> Also we wish to add services such as Virtual web service, SSL, ISDN
> connections.
> To add these other services, it would apear that we would need to add
> additional db tables.

ISDN, no.  ISDN works just like dialup, because it *is* dialup.  There are
RADIUS attributes that regulate whether ISDN connections are allowed.

Virtual hosting and SSL are controlled by your web server.  At the moment
I don't know of many web servers that will read configuration entirely out
of an SQL database.  Of course, we're using Perl here, so it wouldn't be
hard to use, let's say, Apache, and then extend Freeside so that it can
alter the Apache configuration files.